Environmentalists fear weaker fracking rule

She added that her group is still in the dark about what the administration will end up proposing.

“We have no idea what’s in the new draft,” Mall said. “We hope it’s stronger than the leaked drafts, but during those meetings at OMB, they don’t give you any indication. We’re just waiting like everyone else.”

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But leaked versions, some authenticated by Interior and others not, show a trend that favors less oversight of the industry, environmentalists say.

A draft leaked in February shows Interior embracing FracFocus, an industry-backed disclosure website, as the venue for gas producers to post information about the ingredients in their fracking fluids. Interior’s original proposed rule called for the Bureau of Land Management to post the information on a public website and potentially also integrate the data with FracFocus.

The drafts have also exempted acidizing, a well-stimulation process often used in the Monterey Shale in California that uses acid to remove buildup from wells to help them produce more efficiently, Hunt said. She added that the drafts also contain less-stringent rules on well integrity testing and provisions that would make it easier for companies to withhold fracking chemicals as trade secrets.

In meetings with OMB and Interior officials, Hunt said, Sierra Club and other groups have pointed to the holes they feel are going unfilled in the proposed regulations.

“All I have to do is look at the way the regulations have changed since the first leak in 2012, the version that was posted in the Federal Register and the leak in November,” Hunt said. “You can see that they are going in a direction that probably the industry views favorably, and we don’t.”

Still, the idea that BLM would regulate fracking at all has inspired pushback from the industry and its supporters in Congress.

Naatz questioned the eventual cost of implementing the rule on producers, the delays that might result from the added regulation and the need for a “top-down” approach imposed by Washington.

“I think the beauty will always be in the eye of the beholder,” Naatz said. “The premise of the environmental community is that this practice is completely unregulated and it’s just the wild, wild West out there. Our basic premise is that this is an unnecessary rule when you look at the track records of the states. We have a fundamental disagreement on whether this is needed at all.”